NIELSEN THE SYMPHONIES - eClassical

Carl Nielsen began his Symphony No. 5 in October 1920 and the first of the
two movements of this symphony was completed about 1st March 1921. Short -
ly thereafter, however, Nielsen was obliged to put aside the symphony to con -
cen trate on a choral commission which resulted in Springtime in Funen. It was
only at the beginning of November, when he went to Gothenburg to conduct
nine concerts between 13th November and 11th December, that he was able to
concentrate on his symphony: ‘I shall have time for my symphony during the
periods when I am not conducting and I am entirely free from dinner invita -
tions… This is the most difficult task that I have confronted myself with so far
and so it goes only rather slowly.’
There was no subtitle to the new symphony of the sort that had graced the
previous three symphonies, but in his pencil score Nielsen had noted the motto
‘Dark, resting forces / Wakened forces’. In an interview published in the news -
paper Politiken on the same day as the first performance, Nielsen explained his
reasons for the unconventional form of the symphony and also made use of the
motto: ‘My First Symphony was also unnamed. But then came “The Four Tem -
peraments”, “Espansiva” and “The Inextinguishable”, which are all really just
different names for the only thing that music can actually give expression to:
the resting forces in opposition to the active ones… This time I have arranged
things so that I have divided the symphony into two extended, broad parts, the
first of which begins slowly and calmly, whilst the second is more active.’
The critics were entirely positive and Nielsen seems to have been very happy
with the performance. On 8th March of the same year he gave a second per for -
mance of the symphony in Gothenburg, and on 1st December he conducted it
once again, this time in the Beethoven Hall in Berlin with the Berlin Philhar monic
Orchestra. The symphony also formed part of the programme for a con cert in
Paris in October 1926, at which Ravel was present. One can only speculate as to
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